Website Maintenace Plans

Everything you need to do to keep your site secure and running smoothly

website maintenanceA good website maintenance plan is a set of tasks that keep your site updated, secure, and running smoothly.

This guide explains the areas of focus, specific tasks, and frequency that make a website maintenance plan effective.

Get in touch if you'd like more information.

Website Maintenance Plan Focus Areas

A solid and effective website maintenance plan focuses on these areas:

  • Security
  • Content Checks
  • Visitor Analytics
  • Software Updates
  • Ongoing Monitoring
  • Emergency Planning
  • Continuous Improvements

See the sections below for details…

Security

To keep your website as secure as possible, do the things below. Run a periodic check to ensure everyone with backend access to your site is complying with these guidelines.

  Always use strong passwords, which are at least 12 characters long and mix of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters

  Always use two-factor / multi-factor authentication, which requires you to submit a code in addition to your username and password

  Use an SSL/TLS security certificate on your site (so it shows up as https) and make sure to renew the certificate before it expires

  Create backups of your website on a regular basis - keep one copy locally and another copy at a cloud storage provider

Software Updates

Websites run on software frameworks such as WordPress, Bootstrap, and others. Perform these tasks on a regular basis.

  Check the website's underlying software for updates and install them

  Remove unused plugins, themes, and any other code that is no longer actively used

  Be alert to all software updates since they often mitigate recently-discovered security risks

Website Content Checks

Website content (text, images, videos, etc.) should be kept up-to-date, relevant, and efficient.

  Update or remove old content

  Add new content as often as possible

  Optimize images so they download more quickly for visitors with slower Internet connections

  Run a periodic search engine optimization (SEO) check and work to improve your SEO

  Have people not familiar with your website check it for things that don't make sense (then fix them)

Ongoing Monitoring

A website can be offline for hours (or days) without your knowledge, so to ensure it's running properly 24/7, set up automatic monitoring for the things below.

  Website uptime

  Speed and performance

  Broken links

  Missing images

  404 (“page not found”) errors

Website Visitor Analytics

Google Analytics and other tools can collect a large amount of anonymous but valuable data about your website visitors. Periodically look at the data for things like…

  Who, demographically, is visiting your site

  What pages they're looking at and how long they stay on your site

  If your calls-to-action are being clicked

  If your navigation is being used as you expected

  If you get a lot of repeat visitors

Emergency Planning

If your website is important to your business, you need to have an emergency plan. Human error or technical problems can knock a website offline, so set up monitoring as described above and do these things…

  Make a contact list for your domain name registrar, web hosting provider, email provider, web team, etc.

  Send an updated (and offline) document to your team with names, phone numbers, and alternative email address so they can communicate if the site (and its email function) go down.

  Make sure to create frequent site backups, know where they are, and know how to restore them

  Think about using a content delivery network (CDN) which provides redundancy by hosting your site in multiple locations

Continuous Improvements

Businesses and websites are not like books that remain static once printed.

  Make sure your website stays up to date with both its content and its technology

  Periodically check your site on laptops, tablets, and smartphones, then make any necessary improvements

  Continuously improve your site to keep it relevant in search engine results, improve sales, and reduce customer support costs

Maintenance Task Checklist and Schedule

Here is a partial checklist of maintenance tasks to get you started. You and your web team should develop a full maintenance checklist and execution plan.

Weekly

  Check your entire site for 404 errors (“page not found”)

  Check for framework / software updates

  Check for security patches

  Make sure all pages load correctly

  Update content / add blog posts

  Check for broken links

  Create a fresh full-site backup

Monthly

  Run a speed test and fix any problems

  Run security scans

  Check analytics and other site stats

  Update (or remove) older blog articles

Quarterly

  Test / improve calls-to-action

  Confirm that all images are optimized

  Check your backups to make sure they work

  Update the design and/or navigation if things have changed

Annually

  Update copyright notices and other references to the previous year

  Make sure your web domain is on auto-renew

  Make sure your web hosting plan is on auto-renew

Who Provides Website Maintenance Plans and How Much Do They Cost?

Many web development agencies offer maintenance plans. The cost depends on the size and complexity of your website.

Just like preventative maintenance on cars and houses is usually a smart investment, performing regular maintenance on your website will likely be worth much more than its cost.

Let us know if this information is helpful or if you have any questions.

If you'd like a free, no-obligation quote for website maintenance plans, please get in touch.